Clare nodded. She didn’t mind at all the woman’s arm around her back and the gentle pat on her shoulder as they left the waiting room.
The gesture reminded her of mother, but in a way she was glad her parents hadn’t lived to see the misery her life had become with Billy. It would have broken their hearts. She would never have thought he’d hate her so much for leaving him, but he did. She had no doubt he might want to hurt her, but did he despise her so much that he would threaten to hurt their son?
“Put him out of your mind, honey. Your little boy’s waiting for you.”
Clare wasn’t surprised the nurse had guessed her thoughts. She gave the woman a grateful smile. It faded, though, when they reached the ICU and she was guided into a side room where she scrubbed her hands and donned a mask and gloves.
“They’re taking him into the isolation room now.”
Clare followed the surgical nurse’s gaze to where a gurney flanked by masked and gowned members of the transplant team was wheeled into a glass-enclosed room at the opposite end of the ICU.
Tyler.
Her miracle.
* * *
“Damn you, Eduardo, damn you! You murdered our son! You murdered my Daniel!”
Eduardo Ruiz stood in the rear cabin of the chartered jet and said nothing in response to his hysterical wife. He nodded at the nurse waiting by the bed with a hypodermic needle. It took two of Eduardo’s men to hold down Maria, who thrashed like a madwoman among twisted sheets and pillows dampened with sweat and tears. Wild curses filled the air as the needle sank into Maria’s arm. Her ranting became distraught weeping as the sedative quickly took effect.
“Oh, God, Daniel. My son. My sweet little boy. Why did you let him go to that camp, Eduardo? Why?”
Eduardo sat down on the edge of the bed as Maria sank back onto the pillows, and he reached out to stroke her damp hair. She recoiled as if stung and began to fight against the two men who still held her. A sudden burst of air turbulence rocked the private jet and made one of them lose his balance and let go.
Maria swung her arm and struck the side of Eduardo’s head before he could duck, but he kept silent as she was quickly subdued. Her beautiful face swollen and blotchy from weeping, Maria stared at him with red-rimmed eyes. Her voice sank to a hoarse plea.
“Where were you, Eduardo? I was alone when the call came from Daniel’s bodyguards to say he’d been taken to a hospital. God in heaven, my poor Daniel! You were with your whore and I was alone!”
“I’m here now, Maria. Sleep.” Eduardo touched his wife’s tear-stained cheek and this time she didn’t jerk away. The sedative had finally taken effect. As the nurse checked Maria’s pulse, Eduardo waved away the two men who held her. They got off the bed and resumed their posts on opposite sides of the cabin. Eduardo stood, too, and helped the nurse cover his wife with a light blanket.
He should have left Maria in Monterrey but she had insisted on accompanying him to Texas. No, screamed and ranted was more accurate and given the circumstances, he hadn’t refused her.
He’d been in Rio de Janeiro with Luisa when Daniel’s bodyguards had reached him. He’d flown through the night and stopped in Monterrey only long enough to pick up Maria. He imagined she’d need a lot more sedation before their trip was done.
“We’ll be in San Antonio within the hour,” he said to the nurse. “Let me know if she wakes.”
The stout, middle-aged woman nodded and took a seat by the bed while Eduardo left the cabin and strode to the front of the plane. He sank heavily into a leather chair and stared out the window at a thin layer of clouds. Maria’s tormented cries echoed in his mind, blaming him, haunting him. His face grew hot. His sweating hands clenched into fists.
Why, Eduardo? Why did you let him go to that camp?
Rage surged through him as he asked himself the same terrible question. He blamed himself, yes, and he would until the day he died. He blamed his pride in his eleven-year-old son’s genius IQ and how one day Eduardo might use it to suit his ambition. He blamed his arrogance that he could so easily send Daniel under an assumed last name to the United States where they’d like nothing more than to see Eduardo behind bars at a Federal prison, or better yet, dead.
He blamed others, too, including the incompetent pair of bodyguards he’d sent with Daniel to protect him, and the private tutor who had suggested the exclusive computer camp as the perfect place for his gifted son to spend part of the summer.
The tutor had already paid in blood for that suggestion, and the bodyguards would pay, too, no matter they had claimed it was an accident and couldn’t have been prevented. The two men had told him over the phone that the back of Daniel’s bus had been hit by one of those huge American semi-trucks. He’d been hurled with another boy out onto the highway while several other children had died in their seats. Yet Daniel hadn’t died, not right away.
Eduardo groaned under his breath. His gut twisted at the description one of the bodyguards had given him of his injured son.
Daniel had been unrecognizable, the flesh of his face torn away. He’d been taken to a nearby hospital with internal bleeding and rushed into surgery, where he had died minutes later on the operating table.
“Mr. Ruiz, may I get you something to drink?” a male flight attendant asked.
Wrenched from his thoughts, Eduardo lunged out of his seat with an enraged roar. He knocked the startled attendant to the floor where he kicked him until the man was bleeding at the mouth and near senseless.
Eduardo was sweating profusely and breathing hard when he returned to his seat. He stared out the window again and rubbed his heavily muscled forearm while his personal bodyguard, Carlos, pulled the attendant to his feet and half-carried the man back down the aisle.
“Did you forget Mr. Ruiz’s orders, fool?” Carlos demanded. “No one was to speak to him. You’re fortunate that you still live.”
Eduardo didn’t hear a response from the injured flight attendant except moans, and he didn’t expect one. If he heard a word, he was likely to kill the man.
As the cabin grew quiet but for the dull drone of the jet engines, he focused on the terrain below and wished to hell they were already in San Antonio.
His son’s body was waiting for him at the Universal Hospital morgue.
* * *
“Rebecca, the funeral home just called.”
Rebecca Garza remained silent as her husband Victor walked further into their son Ramon’s room. She doubted he was surprised that she didn’t answer him.
She’d spoken little since they had returned home from Universal Hospital the afternoon before. She hadn’t changed her clothes, she hadn’t eaten, and God knows, neither of them had slept. Victor moved up quietly behind her to where she sat at Ramon’s computer desk by the window. He laid his hand on her shoulder and kept his voice low and gentle.
“Sweetheart, they’ve taken Ramon’s body…they have Ramon at the McAlister-Lorenzo Funeral Home. Remember? I authorized them this morning to go pick him up at the hospital. It’s time we make some arrangements.”
“I can’t go to that place, Victor.” She glanced down at the Harley-Davidson watch in her hand, her thumb caressing Ramon’s engraved name on the back. The watch face still bore a streak of blood, but she hadn’t the heart to clean it. Victor squeezed her shoulder, but she shook her head.
“No, I can’t see him again, not like that. His face—you saw it, Victor. There was nothing left that looked like Ramon. And now with what else they’ve done to him…”
She swallowed hard against the memory of Ramon’s battered body hooked up to life support, his spinal cord severed, his crushed and lacerated facial features unrecognizable. She couldn’t bear to imagine that he could look any worse after the surgery to remove his organs.
Instead she glanced around the spacious bedroom that had once held so much life and so many boyish interests. Shelves were crammed with brightly painted motorcycle models, computer books, and Little League trophies. A burnt orange and
white Texas Longhorn blanket was spread across the bed.
At eleven years old, Ramon had already known he wanted to attend the University of Texas in Austin, her alma mater. Now that dream was shattered, the finality of his death a crushing reality. Their handsome family was gone along with the perfect life where nothing bad had ever touched them before.
She and Victor had given Ramon everything two corporate law careers could provide, but no amount of money could have saved his life and spared them from this suffocating grief.
“He’s our son, Rebecca, our only child.” Victor said, drawing her back from her thoughts. “We must go to him.”
Rebecca felt her husband stroking the nape of her neck to soothe her, but a thick rush of tears came anyway. “Please, Victor. I don’t want anyone else to see him. Promise me! I want everyone to remember how Ramon was, happy and laughing, not…”
She jumped up from the chair and buried herself in her husband’s arms, and he held her tight.
“No one has to see him,” Victor whispered into her hair. “We’ll have a closed casket.“
“And a picture on top of us at Christmas…when we were all together.”
“Of course, sweetheart, anything you want.”
Rebecca pulled away to stare into Victor’s brimming eyes while fresh tears tumbled down her face. Her husband looked older to her, his face haggard, the gray along his temples more pronounced. She could only imagine how haggard she must look, too.
“I want him back, Victor. I want our son back the way he was!” Her husband couldn’t speak for a long moment and when he finally managed to, his voice was hoarse.
“I want him back, too. I would have died in his place. But we did the right thing at the hospital. There are kids who’ll get better now and have a healthy life because of Ramon—maybe even some in San Antonio. The doctor said there was a very sick boy on the waiting list for a heart transplant at Universal. I think Ramon would be happy about helping so many—”
Rebecca pressed her fingertips to his lips and he didn’t say any more. He knew that she agreed with him. They hadn’t hesitated to sign the papers for organ donation, and to honor Ramon they planned to carry cards to designate themselves as organ donors. The gesture was the least they could do in his memory.
Especially since she’d been such a terrible mother to him at the end.
She hadn’t wanted to look at him in the ER or even touch his hand. His injuries had turned him into a hideous monster and she had hated herself at that moment for even thinking such a thing. When she’d heard there was no hope, she had insisted that Victor take her home at once where they’d awaited the call that the transplant surgery had begun.
“Forgive me, Ramon,” she whispered. She set the watch on the desk and lifted her eyes to Victor’s.
“You don’t want Ramon to wear—”
“No. I want to keep it.”
Victor said nothing more as Rebecca brushed her fingers across the silver watchband, then she gripped his hand as they left their son’s bedroom.
She hoped God would forgive her, too.
CHAPTER TWO
“Mr. Salinas, your son was very badly disfigured so I want you to be prepared,” advised the young man who’d met Eduardo at the hospital front desk to accompany him to the basement morgue.
Eduardo said nothing but followed his somber-faced escort deeper into the cold, cavernous room.
He found it jarring to be addressed by his mother-in-law’s maiden name, Salinas, but the subterfuge was essential to conceal his identity while he was in the United States—and it had been the same for Daniel, too.
The Feds would descend upon San Antonio like flies on steaming shit if they discovered a top-ranking member of the Castillo drug cartel was in their country. Eduardo stopped in front of one of the large stainless steel drawers lining the left wall of the morgue, where the attendant peered at his clipboard through his glasses.
“Number 19. Daniel Salinas.” He glanced up at Eduardo. “I’m truly sorry for your loss, sir.”
“Get on with it. Let me see him.” Eduardo felt his every muscle brace as the morgue attendant pulled out the drawer to reveal a slight shrouded body. “I want to see all of him.”
The young man obliged him and flipped back the white sheet, while Eduardo thanked again his decision to leave Maria waiting for him in their rented limo. He tasted the bitterness of bile at the back of his throat but somehow he quelled the urge to vomit.
It wasn’t that the boy’s chest and abdomen had been ravaged in surgery, or that there was nothing left of recognizable features, an ugly red sinus cavity and shreds of flesh where the nose and cheeks had been. It was the stark realization burning in Eduardo’s brain as he registered every last detail that this battered corpse was not his son.
“There are other boys in the morgue from this accident?”
The attendant shook his head and began to roll the sheet up over the body. “Your son is the last one here, Mr. Salinas. McAlister-Lorenzo sent a hearse for the Garza boy early this morning, poor kid. Ramon Garza. They were the only two air-lifted to this hospital after the accident, and his face was even worse—”
“McAlister-Lorenzo?”
“Yes, sir, the big funeral home off Loop 1604 in north San Antonio.” The young man glanced at Eduardo with embarrassment after tucking the sheet around the corpse’s narrow shoulders and head. “I’m sorry, sir. I shouldn’t have said that about the Garza boy’s face. His parents did a wonderful thing to donate his organs to others in need. Do you have a funeral home in mind that you’d like for me to call—Sir? Mr. Salinas?”
“My name is Ruiz,” Eduardo spat under his breath. He was already halfway to the exit so there was no way the attendant could have heard him. His thoughts were murderous toward his son’s two bodyguards who also waited in the car with Carlos holding them at gunpoint.
Donated his organs?
Eduardo might have been able to overlook the bodyguards not knowing Daniel’s upper left thigh bore a three-inch scar from a bicycle accident, which would have helped them to identify him. But he would kill them with his bare hands if it were true his son’s body had been cut apart into pieces.
Daniel’s disfigurement must have been massive for those parents to make such an unforgivable mistake, and the corpse—this Ramon Garza—bore an uncanny physical resemblance to his son with his slim build and short black hair.
Cursing under his breath, Eduardo ignored the morgue attendant still shouting after him and shoved his way through the door.
* * *
Universal Hospital
The next morning
“Ms. Carson, I got a call that you have a visitor.”
Clare’s eyes flew open at the sound of the ICU nurse’s voice and she lunged out of the chair. “Tyler?”
The young woman looked apologetically at Clare. “He’s fine, Ms. Carson. I startled you. I’m sorry.”
“No, no, it’s all right.” Clare glanced from a wall clock that read almost ten a.m. to her son, her heart still pounding from waking up so abruptly. Tyler appeared so small in the hospital bed. The heart monitor blinked nearby and IVs were stuck in his arms, his chest tube removed only an hour ago, but he slept soundly. She looked over at the ICU nurse. “You said I had a visitor?”
“Irene Davis. Said she was your neighbor.”
Clare exhaled with relief that Billy hadn’t decided to make another unexpected and unpleasant appearance. As the ICU nurse went to the opposite side of Tyler’s bed to check on his IVs, Clare stepped closer to squeeze her son’s hand. She was reluctant to leave him but it might be a good idea to stretch her legs.
“Mommy will be right back, sweetheart,” she whispered as she gave his fingers another gentle squeeze. She felt so grateful that he was alive, she couldn’t help standing there for a moment to stare at him.
His chest rising and falling with each breath was a miracle to her. The sweetest miracle. She hadn’t felt anything like it since the day he was born.
>
She had tried for years to have a baby and had almost given up hope when she’d learned she was pregnant. Tyler had always been her miracle child. She would have been content to stand there all day looking at him, but she knew her friend Irene was waiting for her. With a last glance at his heart monitor, Clare left the private isolation room and suppressed a yawn as she discarded her mask and gloves.
She wasn’t surprised she had dozed off. She’d spent the night in the sleeping area for parents, but she’d hardly slept and couldn’t wait to get back this morning to Tyler’s bedside. Something about being close to him again had relaxed her, and she was glad for a few moments’ rest. She still felt exhausted but exhilarated, too, that she had positive news to share with Irene.
Tyler wasn’t out of the woods yet, but so far, so good. The doctors were optimistic about his recovery and Clare had never felt more hopeful. The warm sunlight streaming in the windows lining the hall to the waiting room buoyed her spirits even more. She turned into the room and smiled as her tall, model-thin friend jumped up from a couch to greet her.
“Oh, Clare, how’s Tyler?”
“Sleeping right now, but the doctors tell me everything’s on track.”
“Thank God.”
As Irene threw her well-toned arms around Clare to give her a hug, Clare glanced at the other people in the waiting room who turned from the morning news blaring on a corner TV to give her encouraging smiles. It amazed her that life could have turned around so abruptly from the terror of the past few days.
“Here, come and sit.” Irene grabbed Clare’s hand and pulled her toward a pair of wing chairs set away from the TV. “Tell me everything. So Tyler’s doing okay?“
“So far so good. I couldn’t have hoped for things to go any better except for Billy coming here yesterday morning.”
“No shit.” Her mood suddenly grown subdued, Irene sank into the nearest chair while Clare sat down beside her. “Did you call the cops?”
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